The Roof of the Dorms, Tuesday Afternoon

[genesishero]

It wasn't that Evan was big on shirking his responsibilities, but this week he was seriously not feeling up to going into work. With Thanksgiving in a couple of days, 'service with a smile' or even being in remotely the right mindset to be helpful to customers was the last thing he could manage, and so he'd handwavily left his boss an apologetic message saying that he couldn't come in today, and he'd spent most of his morning in bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking and trying to get the heavy weighted feeling out of his chest.

Of course, being a dog owner, it wasn't like he could hide in bed forever. It was a couple of hours into his 'stay in bed all day' escapade that Ozzy decided that it wasn't just time for walkies, it was time to leap up onto the bed to inform Evan of the fact that it was time for walkies by licking his face into submission until his boy relented and finally rolled out to pull on his clothes. And once Ozzy had been taken for a walk, it just seemed like a terrible waste of the day to crawl back under the covers. A tempting waste of a day, but still a terrible one. So, Evan grabbed a book and an umbrella, and he made his way up to the roof. It was cold and a little wet out, but that wasn't a bad thing, necessarily. It was difficult to mope when you were trying to keep your book dry.

... There were worse ways to cope with a case of holiday blahs than reading outside in the rain in November, right? Yeah. Yeah, there had to be.

[Open roof! This kid, sometimes. Honestly.]

Comments

[solarhippie]

Karolina had a portal to get to in about an hour, for Thanksgiving in Los Angeles. And since she was all packed, she was... pretty much just doing the dance of the 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do now'. Which, even though the weather wasn't great, led her up to the roof, for want of anything better to do.

"... Oh, I didn't think anyone would be up here."

[genesishero]

"That's kind of what brought me up here," Evan admitted, peering out from under his umbrella and offering Karolina a tiny smile. "Sorry, did you need the roof for something? I can be quiet and out of the way..."

Really, he wasn't as tiny as he used to be. He'd apparently had a growth spurt in the past year or so, but 'out of the way' was still completely doable.

[arsenicmauls]

Old Lace hated the rain, but unfortunately for her, Gert knew the amount of times that deinonychuses needed to be walked per day, and she happened to care about sticking to that number, so today their walk was bringing them to the roof of the dorms. It was a bit like a compromise, because that way, Old Lace wouldn't have to dirty her claws in muddy grass.

"Come on, just ten minutes," Gert was insisting as she stepped up onto the rooftop with her pet in tow. "Oh. Hey, Evan."

[genesishero]

"Gert?" Evan blinked up from his book, glancing out from under his umbrella. "Gert and Old Lace," he amended. "What brings you two up to the roof in the rain?"

Apparently it was a happenin' place to be.

[solarhippie]

"Oh, no, no," Karolina said, shaking her head. "I mean, I can go back downstairs too, if you'd rather be alone. I didn't come here for anything special. I'm just killing time."

Maybe they could have a politeness-off.

[genesishero]

They could just be courteous to one another until one gave in and let the other be more courteous!

"Oh... I don't mind the company," Evan ventured, glancing down at his book. "I was just, um, reading."

On the roof in the rain in November, which was perfectly normal, thank you.

[arsenicmauls]

"Walkies," Gert said succinctly. Old Lace growled, clearly unhappy with that term. "What about you?"

[genesishero]

"Fresh air," Evan volunteered. "Ozzy and I already finished his walkies, and now he's napping, and I had a book I was reading..."

There wasn't really a way to spin this that made it sound less weird, at least to his own ears, so he tapered off and added a shrug.

"I wanted to go somewhere quiet to read that wasn't my room."

[arsenicmauls]

"And the library and the common rooms were too arid and paperback-friendly?" Gert wondered. Hey, if he was up here to use the Roof of Emo to its full potential, she wasn't judging, but she did want to at least demonstrate that she was all ears if he had something bothering him that he wanted to talk about.

[genesishero]

"Something like that," Evan replied, trying a little smile on for size to show that he wasn't too emo, honest. "There's never any telling what the books are going to get up to in the library, and you're more likely to have people wandering into and out of the common rooms, right? I mean, that's where the food lives."

Adventures in introversion. Second-guessing high school kids didn't work out so well.

"And I have an umbrella!"

[solarhippie]

"... Really?"

It wasn't judgmental, really. The way she glanced around and tilted her head was more like she was wondering whether there were any feasible benefits to reading on a roof in the rain in November that she'd somehow missed.

[arsenicmauls]

"Okay, okay," Gert conceded, holding up her hands to show she was dropping it. "I've just never seen reading a book in the rain before. Although back home it only rains, like, once a year. OL and I are still getting used to it."

She shrugged. Old Lace whined.

"Anyway, what's up other than precipitation?"

[genesishero]

"Not much, really," Evan replied, shrugging apologetically. "I took the day off work, and I'm done classes for the week, so there's really not much for me to do until my library shift on Sunday. Figure out how to make proper cranberry sauce, I guess. For the Student Council potluck thing?"

He was right on top of making that cranberry sauce. Right on it.

[genesishero]

"It was quiet," Evan explained, after a moment of watching her look around. "And it wasn't being cooped up in my room, so it seemed like a good place. The rain doesn't bother me too much, anyway."

It was wet, and it was chilly, but wet and chilly weren't really enough to bother the genetic successor to Apocalypse.

[arsenicmauls]

"Oh, is that tomorrow?" Gert said, crinkling her nose. "Uh, I guess you could always pick some up from Luke's. They're in major Thanksgiving mode over there."

[genesishero]

"It's... one of these days," Evan replied, and then winced. "Usually I'm better at keeping on top of this sort of thing, but this year's been... weird." Traumatic. Something. "But just picking it up from a restaurant kind of feels like cheating at it... isn't it?"

He didn't sound too sure. Maybe cheater-sauce was better than distracted-and-thus-burned-sauce?

[arsenicmauls]

"Not if the restaurant stuff's better than what you could make on your own," Gert reasoned. "Then it's a public service."

Wise, Gert. Very wise.

[genesishero]

Evan fell silent for a moment, considering that.

"But... what if you think maybe you can make it just fine... if you remember helping make it for Thanksgiving meals growing up... but actually going through with it alone for the first time has you scared?"

Scared and a little heartsick, but he wasn't going to leap right into 'heartsick' quite so early in the conversation.

[arsenicmauls]

Gert processed that, and she thought about the fact that, yeah, she didn't exactly feel like leaping into the holidays either. Not yet, anyway. And sure, that was kind of an annual thing for her -- no one would ever accuse Gertrude Yorkes of having much holiday spirit -- but at the same time, there was something else going on there, too.

"That depends," she said after a moment. "Do you want to try?"

[abitlowkey]

"Are you not cold?" Loki, stop flaunting that you're fine with the chill. It was uncouth.

[genesishero]

"A little bit, I guess," Evan replied, glancing up at Loki and shrugging. "I've been to colder places, though."

He'd been thoroughly trounced once in Antarctica. That had been... not fun at all.

"I guess I haven't really been paying much attention to the temperature, though."

[genesishero]

"I don't want to give up before I've even made an attempt, but that's not really the same thing as wanting to try," Evan sighed. "This seemed way easier to figure out back at the Student Council planning meetings."

He probably should have just stuck with chicken fingers or something.

[arsenicmauls]

"'Cause I've never made cranberry sauce," Gert disclaimed, "but I was thinking of commandeering a kitchen to try and make potato pancakes. It's Hanukkah tomorrow, and my parents' latkes used to be amazing, so... if you want to share the kitchen with me, we can help each other out?"

[abitlowkey]

"Perhaps to be blamed on the season," Loki ventured. "The Internet tells me it lends toward melancholy and peppermint Starbucks."

Mostly the latter.

[ultron_junior]

Victor had been thinking about working some more on flight, but when he got up to the roof --

A, it was crowded. B, it was raining harder than he'd thought. So no flying for him, at least not right away.

"Is there a reason everyone's up here?"